Replacement pilots experience change

[Nikademus]

best solution i came up with within the framework of the game was to keep Allied replacement constant and generous (around 60-65 median), and for Japan, gave her a bigger starting "pool" of replacement pilots to tap (or try to conserve) with a low production rate per month. I also lowered the median slightly so that she did not get replacements of the same caliber as the pre-war cadre which was small to begin with (as far as the elite pilots went)

This resulted in a milder curve, dropping Japanese exp as replacements are filtered in as opposed to stock where it tends to be a cliff drop (due to exp 20-40 pilots going straight into the airgroups)

[el cid again]

ORIGINAL: Elladan

Unlike Nik I am NOT following your point - and you have NOT answered my question above: WHY is (NON EOS) RHS "far from historical"???

I will state it again, I'm talking only about replacement pilot experience rate. Not about RHS as a whole. In first post of this tread I asked if this rate changes as time passes. The only experience based answer was by Mike Solli. Based on this and my own test I accept a hypothesis that replacement pilot experience rates are constant in time.

REPLY: Yes and no. The absolute value of replacements which are NOT named pilots is constant. The average value of replacement pilots is different - and somewhat under player control - because of the effect of named pilots.

Now to the point - in history Allies won the war in air because of:
a) better planes (some will probably disagree),

REPLY: Yes and no. There is a consensus - then and now - that SOME planes were NOT better. Japan had the best flying boat. Japan had the best recon planes (something we imitate to this day). Japan had the best of planes of unique types - when you are not in the race you get no standing at the finish line. And "best" may not be the same thing for all players.
What is best for Japan might not be best for the US for example. It cannot be denied the US produced more and better heavy bombers. But if Japanese fighters were not better - how can a single one have defeated an entire squadron - and shot down 18 - without even a wingman? Lack of pilot experience and fuel prevented their fighters from having a chance most of the time - but that does not mean they were not better in fundamental senses. IF you use MODERN standards of evaluation (and consider cost) - THEN you might have to admit their planes were indeed better. We spent more money, more aluminum, and got bigger planes which had - and needed - more power - but in the end all that extra spending could still be killed only once. That is not the ideal theoretical solution (although it is a typical American solution). The ideal "best" fighter plane should be cheap and "expendable."

b) more planes,

REPLY: LOTS more planes

c) bigger supply of properly trained pilots due to better training system,

REPLY: or perhaps just a bigger population base and more training institutions/nations involved - Japan was not facing a single enemy

d) some degree of luck, but as we can't model this we might as well drop it.

REPLY: maybe - but I think you miss the big picture here: it is always easier to lose a war than to win it; Japan guaranteed its own defeat in half a dozen ways; it had no strategic plan (compared, say, to the Russo Japanese War where it took on a similar size enemy in relative terms but HAD a plan); and over a big war luck tends to even out;
Only at Midway was Japan unlucky - and Morison claims they broke ALL the laws of war in that battle - so I think even then they pretty much guaranteed a disaster

Now in RHS:
a) can't really say, haven't played it long enough, but assume it's ok,

REPLY: it is experimental and new - it may have problems - and I think it has at least one major problem and several minor ones

b) as only Japan can tinker with production in WitP, it will (nearly) always be able to outproduce Allies,

REPLY: Stuff and nonsense. It can NEVER outproduce the Allies. IF you are honest - and add up all the things the Allies have/get - Japan never can come close - never come close to being outclassed 2:1. You should not read the production on the map as the total production for the Allies. You must add to it the value of all the off map stuff which appears at the map edges as well.

c) it's opposite in RHS, Japan will have many more higly experienced pilots, more and more as time passes.
So in short - RHS is far from historical because it deviates in points b and c. (point b is not your fault, all scenarios have this problem)

REPLY: I do not follow this at all. It makes me wonder if you have a different system of mathmetics than I do?
The Allies have vastly greater numbers of experienced pilots. And the Allies can train up their inexperienced pilots to high levels as well - while the Allies have the potential to PREVENT Japan from doing that - to a greater or lesser degree depending on your skill. This is quite intentional - and a function of the way the game works and the particular map area we use. The ALLIES have areas to work up green units that can not be cut off from supply. Japan can be cut off at the knees by killing its imports - something that matters in RHS because we killed "free supply" on the main map areas.
On top of this - my numbers are based on REAL numbers - not some subjective feeling. In 1941 the JNAF was the biggest naval air force in the world - bigger than the USN. It never gets any bigger - it isn't as big as all the Allies put together - but it essentially only has the help of a smaller JAAF - not a host of significant countries. But these are actually only a fraction of the real world Japanese numbers - I don't let them have the pilots who fly planes not in the game - nor pilots with other jobs (not actual pilots of planes in the game).

What IS "historical"???

Steady, big enough, supply of properly trained Allied pilots on one side and very low supply of highly talented Japanese pilots plus a lot of relatively green ones on the other side is historical. (I guess it means stock values are quite good in fact)

REPLY: This is hard to do. Actually the pilot training schemes of both sides were NOT "steady" but grew. Starting them - as I do - where they were when the war begins - means they are very much too small later on in the war. Starting them where they were later in the war means you can never simulate the critical year of 1942 accurately - and for that reason have zero chance of a meaningful mid war situation. It is a conundrum I cannot fix - it is inherent in the system. Ignoring that we MUST do 1942 right is not a solution IMHO. But - yes - in a sense - it is a problem. Yet it is a problem in ALL forms of WITP - and indeed MORE so in non RHS - because only in RHS are we giving you close to the right numbers (based on actual measurements of program outputs with the "extra" pilots removed) for ANY period of the war.

How do you figure out what the numbers should be??? That is, what methodology do you use to say "this should be 50" vice 40 or 60 or 49 or 51???

Never said a word about what value it should be.
What matters in my opinion is a relative experience of Japanese vs Allied pilots, effect of experience on air combat results and easiness of on-map training. Still thinking about it.

REPLY: Not an answer here. But since the game has a mechanism to develop experience in combat - that is NOT our job. We let players use units to work up experience of that form. All we need (or get) to do is worry about the basic training NOT involved in the operations (which we are simulating). The only long standing measure of experience widely used is flight training hours. Here things get really sticky: if the Japanese do well should they automatically be forced to have pilots who don't get any gas to train with? I think the answer is certainly no - but do you disagree? It is as if one says "they can win the war, have unlimited fuel, but we forbid them to use it to train." I think we need to assume they CAN train - and simulate the effect of killing the fuel in the game - by killing the imports and industry that generates the supply points (and also that generates the planes). IF they produce no supply points they cannot fly - so they are defacto in the real situation. IF they produce planes and supplies - I think we must assume they also could train up to the earlier standard. And since we have NO way to adjust this anyway - it is pretty much academic.

And why is it your view that we can ignore the situation in the early war period in favor of some later period??? All games start in 1941 - so THAT is what we must program for first of all.

You are right if you want to make a "Pearl Harbor to Midway" scenario. If you want a Grand Campaign you have to think about later years too.

REPLY: Actually I do think about later years. But there is no escape of the fundamentals: you cannot find out what a mid war situation looks like if you force the early war to be grossly distorted. Further, the basic geography, weight of numbers and level of technology that must enter the mid and late war in Allied hands pretty much renders this discussion moot. A victorious Japan is still likely to lose by being overwhelmed. Japan's military leadership correctly understood the US was a non-militarized society - with obsoletscent equipment and concepts - and a population lacking in anything similar to the Samouri spirit. They grossly underestimated the degree of resolve generated by the attack on Pearl Harbor - the degree to which we would build up and invest in a whole new generation of technologies - or even our willingness to sacrifice numbers of lives to retake the area. [It is not possible we could do such a campaign today - our government would fall with even 1% of the casualties] I don't worry about what I cannot control - and about what is going to tend to turn out right no matter what I do (or any player does). I worry about what I can control - and hope we get a better produce bye and bye.

Later - whatever happened - Japan will be overwhelmed by numbers and by quality of enemy aircraft - it cannot be avoided.

With current experience settings I have serious doubts about it. That's why I starter this thread in the first place.

Uff, such a long post [:)] And a disclaimer: English is not my native language, so what I actually wrote might not be what I had thought. [;)]

You wrote very well indeed. What is your primary language?

FYI the entire WITP game collapses late in 1944 - and CAN NOT be played with AI as Japan after about August 1944.
It collapsed on the issue of air power: by December 1944 Japan has ZERO fighter units, ZERO bomber units in the normal sense, ZERO recon units, ZERO patrol units, ZERO transports - you get the idea. Dumb hard code.

Also FYI sometime in 1944 - probably 1 July - the terms of air combat (and possibly AAA combat) change so Japan is hard pressed to compete at all. Again - hard code.

You are far too worried about the number of pilots and far too little worried about the strategic situation:

once the Allies have a B-24 force in strength - NOTHING stands before it. EVERY base and resource center and manufacturing center in range is gone. It slowly creeps forward - where is up to the Allies - until there is no way to run the Japanese economy. At that point it lives on stores. When these are gone - the economy collapses. NO more plane production. NO more supply production (of the sort done by HI). Japan is not going to have its whole force available - and what force it has is not going to be effective due to both supply issues and the way code makes combat harder than it used to be.

[el cid again]

ORIGINAL: Nikademus

best solution i came up with within the framework of the game was to keep Allied replacement constant and generous (around 60-65 median), and for Japan, gave her a bigger starting "pool" of replacement pilots to tap (or try to conserve) with a low production rate per month. I also lowered the median slightly so that she did not get replacements of the same caliber as the pre-war cadre which was small to begin with (as far as the elite pilots went)

This resulted in a milder curve, dropping Japanese exp as replacements are filtered in as opposed to stock where it tends to be a cliff drop (due to exp 20-40 pilots going straight into the airgroups)

There is merit in this approach. But whatever can be said for it - historically accurate it isn't. It wholly ignores the size of Japanese training classes - and it wholly ignores that "elite" training was not the thing that mattered - "fundamental" training was. Ultimately Japan contracted training out to civilian flying schools - and this is a valid idea - wholly ignored here.

Since Japan has two different systems (in game and IRL) - it would be possible to use DIFFERENT approaches for JAAF and JNAF. The problem is that JNAF is the bigger service - so giving it fewer pilots (which IRL was not the case) - isn't historically accurate either. JNAF has both more pilots and better pilots - and more units to feed with pilots. And arguing that pilot quality declined because it was written in stone is to miss the big picture: Japan knew how to train perfectly well - it got rid of its excessively high standards in favor of sound ones - and it could not do so ONLY because it lacked aviation spirit. WE have a game that permits the Allies to inflict such a situation if they can - and if they cannot - it is actually historically wrong to pretend they did so.

[wdolson]

ORIGINAL: Elladan
b) more planes,

ORIGINAL: el cid again
REPLY: LOTS more planes

The Allies advantage was more quantitative than qualitative, though abundance of resources and factories safe from enemy bombing did give the US the luxury of building their goods with consistent quality.

There are different measures of quality too. From a stand point of reliability, American made equipment was superior in almost all areas. The humble 6X6 truck was so good that some 3rd world armies today still use trucks built during WW II. The French army didn't retire their Lend Lease trucks until the 1970s. World War II British or German made trucks bring hefty prices on the collector's market because they are so rare. Most of them fell apart before the war was over.

American aircraft may not have been the world's best in many categories, but most were extremely reliable and generally tougher than the competition. And even if the US didn't have the best, they had the most. At the end of the war the US scrapped many thousands of airframes with essentially zero hours on them. I spoke once with a vetran who's job in 1945 was ferrying brand new P-40s from the factory to the scrapping yard.

c) bigger supply of properly trained pilots due to better training system,


REPLY: or perhaps just a bigger population base and more training institutions/nations involved - Japan was not facing a single enemy

To be fair, both the UK and the US were facing tougher enemies than Japan was. Germany was a more serious opponent than China was to Japan. It was also more potent than what the British could do in the Far East for most of the war.

I think both the US and the Commonwealth actually did had superior pilot training programs. From the start fo the war, the RAF started training pilots for a long war of attrition and the US followed suit. Both those powers also rotated pilots home, which conserved the institutional memory (knowledge that is not written down or stored in any tangible form, but it passed down from person to person within the organization), which is a very important factor.

After the Guadalcanal campaign, Japan's pre-war pilot pool was badly depleted. With every pilot killed, several man-years of institutional knowledge died with them. When losses are relatively light, the veterans can absorb and train the rookies (something the game actually models fairly well), but when losses are heavy, the rookies end up training each other and the overall quality deteriorates. The Allies were much more effective at capturing this knowledge and imparting it on the new pilots.

b) as only Japan can tinker with production in WitP, it will (nearly) always be able to outproduce Allies,

REPLY: Stuff and nonsense. It can NEVER outproduce the Allies. IF you are honest - and add up all the things the Allies have/get - Japan never can come close - never come close to being outclassed 2:1. You should not read the production on the map as the total production for the Allies. You must add to it the value of all the off map stuff which appears at the map edges as well.

Japan might be able to out produce the Allies in a narrow area, but it is at the expense of other things. I agree with you Sid, overall the Allies will always have more.

Bill

[wdolson]

ORIGINAL: el cid again
Since Japan has two different systems (in game and IRL) - it would be possible to use DIFFERENT approaches for JAAF and JNAF. The problem is that JNAF is the bigger service - so giving it fewer pilots (which IRL was not the case) - isn't historically accurate either. JNAF has both more pilots and better pilots - and more units to feed with pilots. And arguing that pilot quality declined because it was written in stone is to miss the big picture: Japan knew how to train perfectly well - it got rid of its excessively high standards in favor of sound ones - and it could not do so ONLY because it lacked aviation spirit. WE have a game that permits the Allies to inflict such a situation if they can - and if they cannot - it is actually historically wrong to pretend they did so.

Late war, the lack of avgas did impact Japanese pilot training, but the quality of their training deteriorated before they began to run out of fuel. Japan was not prepared for a long war. They expected the war to be over in months.

Initially they gave no thought to expanding their training program to replace losses. When the losses began to mount, they needed to do something fast and cut a lot of corners to get pilots into combat units as fast as possible. They couldn't scale up their prewar training program because it was designed to wash out as many candidates as possible so they ended up with only the best and it lasted years. That system was completely unworkable during a full scale war. The British and US systems could be scaled with only minor changes compared to what the Japanese faced.

The Code of Bushido was also terrible at conserving human capital. They realized way too late that the code led to the unnecessary loss of a lot of skilled people who they desperately needed.

Bill

[Nikademus]

ORIGINAL: el cid again

There is merit in this approach. But whatever can be said for it - historically accurate it isn't. It wholly ignores the size of Japanese training classes - and it wholly ignores that "elite" training was not the thing that mattered - "fundamental" training was. Ultimately Japan contracted training out to civilian flying schools - and this is a valid idea - wholly ignored here.

I feel its more historically accurate than stock for the reasons i gave previously, and represents an attempt to produce the curve of decline in Japanese pilot skill that is documented in several sources. I'm well aware of the inaccuracies inherent in the abstraction and limitation of the way its set up. In real life Japan didn't even have enough fully trained pilots to man all her planes at war's start, particularily carrier qualified pilots.

JNAF has both more pilots and better pilots - and more units to feed with pilots. And arguing that pilot quality declined because it was written in stone is to miss the big picture: Japan knew how to train perfectly well - it got rid of its excessively high standards in favor of sound ones

Japanese pilot quality declined because her system was not designed until later in the war to churn out large #'s of qualified pilots and in the latter half of the war, because stocks of avgas began to run out forcing a truncation of flight hours for the new trainees....not because it was written in stone.

[el cid again]

ORIGINAL: wdolson

ORIGINAL: Elladan
b) more planes,

ORIGINAL: el cid again
REPLY: LOTS more planes

The Allies advantage was more quantitative than qualitative, though abundance of resources and factories safe from enemy bombing did give the US the luxury of building their goods with consistent quality.

REPLY: The picture is very mixed here. One might reasonably hold various opinions. But at its heart this is nationalistic propaganda: it is not generally true. It is occasionally true - often false - particularly when one considers that all cases of equality also render the statement false (not just the cases of superiority). Then too - what is "better" might not be the same for both sides for various reasons. Because the picture is so mixed - and because the numerical advantages were overwhelming - it is essentially backwards: the Allies did have both quantative and qualitative advantages, but the former was far more significant - and the latter was marginal. My first chief told me the IJN built better warships - and over time I have come to appreciate he was far more right than wrong. But Takishi Hara (Japanese Destroyer Captain) believed they had to sink 5:1 to stay even - and they were not nearly that much better. During the war USN estimated we needed 2:1 numerical advantage to be even.

[el cid again]

ORIGINAL: wdolson


There are different measures of quality too. From a stand point of reliability, American made equipment was superior in almost all areas. The humble 6X6 truck was so good that some 3rd world armies today still use trucks built during WW II. The French army didn't retire their Lend Lease trucks until the 1970s. World War II British or German made trucks bring hefty prices on the collector's market because they are so rare. Most of them fell apart before the war was over.

Bill

Essentially propaganda. Trucks which long survived were not being used. During the war it was found that "a vehicle with 30,000 miles was more trouble than it was worth to fix." To imply US vehicles were able to go even the designed standard (100,000 miles) - or many times that - is quite misleading - because they were not on the statistical average.

The big difference between Japan's industry and ours was size. Japan fielded mainly OUR designs - so if they were good or bad it was OUR engineering that was good or bad - not theirs. And they did lead the world in aspects of automotive engineering - some which the whole world copied post war. The best example of this is diesel power for vehicles. Only wartime Japan - actually long pre war Japan - went this way. But it became the norm.

It is easy to read this sort of stuff - and I have read it all my life. Only slowly - over decades - living in Japan - studing history and technology (sometimes as part of forinsic teams examing wartime Japanese technology) did I learn that what we are usually told in the US is more wrong than right. I was told Japan failed to convert its automotive industry to aircraft production: IRL it did so TOO MUCH - and by the time they figured it out it was too late to build enough tanks to matter (although they had nice 75mm designs). Lots of things like that turn out to be the norm - and lots of things we are told are based on false assumptions - not examination of the data.

[el cid again]

ORIGINAL: wdolson


c) bigger supply of properly trained pilots due to better training system,


REPLY: or perhaps just a bigger population base and more training institutions/nations involved - Japan was not facing a single enemy

To be fair, both the UK and the US were facing tougher enemies than Japan was. Germany was a more serious opponent than China was to Japan. It was also more potent than what the British could do in the Far East for most of the war.

I think both the US and the Commonwealth actually did had superior pilot training programs. From the start fo the war, the RAF started training pilots for a long war of attrition and the US followed suit. Both those powers also rotated pilots home, which conserved the institutional memory (knowledge that is not written down or stored in any tangible form, but it passed down from person to person within the organization), which is a very important factor.

After the Guadalcanal campaign, Japan's pre-war pilot pool was badly depleted. With every pilot killed, several man-years of institutional knowledge died with them. When losses are relatively light, the veterans can absorb and train the rookies (something the game actually models fairly well), but when losses are heavy, the rookies end up training each other and the overall quality deteriorates. The Allies were much more effective at capturing this knowledge and imparting it on the new pilots.

Bill

There is a lot of merit in these comments - but also two problems:

a) Both major Axis powers believed they could not win a protracted war with the USA - and both were right in that strategic assessment. Both believed it would take the US a lot longer than it really did to build up and implement its potential power - and both were wrong in that strategic assessment. Both had very different ideas about the nature of military forces - in particular both believed in classical land armies - and the US in general - and General Marshall in particular - elected to invest in aircraft - heavy bombers in particular - INSTEAD of the army the traditional school advocated. It is by no means clear that the air power of the Allies was well and wisely used - but it is very clear it changed the very nature of the contest from what was expected - and it did render the significance of the larger Japanese ground army far less important than it might have been. Japan failed to fight a war which optimized its great land power - instead it found itself in an AIR war of attrition it was ill suited to win quantitatively. However well the Japanese do - they are going to be losing - if they fight an air war.

b) The view "Germany was more dangerous" is based on wartime assumptions - assumptions which IRL prooved essentially false. Japan had by far a better strategic position. It was far from its enemies (China and Russia excepted).
It enjoyed a great amount of support in its part of the world due to the behaviors of the colonial powers - the US included - for over a century. [Even Chinese nationalists were happy with the rise of Japan - UNTIL the War of Resistence began] We (and everyone else including the Germans) failed to grasp the superiority of Japanese scientists - only the Japanese examined this dispassionately - and concluded they had a better shot at atomic power (goal one) and atom bombs (goal two) and radiological weapons (goal three) than Germany did. We did not understand the Japanese were better than even the Russians at penetrating our research - and cherry picking it - so that it may well be their very first atomic bomb design was far more weaponized (reliable, safe, dependable) than any of ours were. We did not have a clue how to solve problems theoretically - so we stumbled around with experimentalists - while in Japan the same problems were solved on the blackboard - sometimes before we even tried to solve them - other times after we tried and ran into trouble (they could say "here is where they screwed up"). THROUGHOUT the war Japan kept the sitting PM ACCURATELY briefed on our "top secret" Manhattan Project. Only in 1945 did we begin to grasp otherwise - when MAGIC intercepts and captured shipments caused us to understand Japan was part of a trading group in atomic materials (materials useful - not just fuels) - some of which were better than ours to such an extent we use them to this day (see Zircon - fuel cladding still used - invented during WWII in Germany - traded to Japan). [WHY did wartime Germany and Japan need fuel cladding if they had no reactors to fuel?????] Granted - we didn't capture any Japanese reactors (the Russians captured two) - but that isn't the same thing as they didn't have any. When he realized we had missed a trick - in 1945 - Gen Groves hit the roof. Much of this material is still very hush hush - apparently because the technology is so practical we fear terrorists could exploit it.

[el cid again]

ORIGINAL: wdolson



After the Guadalcanal campaign, Japan's pre-war pilot pool was badly depleted. With every pilot killed, several man-years of institutional knowledge died with them. When losses are relatively light, the veterans can absorb and train the rookies (something the game actually models fairly well), but when losses are heavy, the rookies end up training each other and the overall quality deteriorates. The Allies were much more effective at capturing this knowledge and imparting it on the new pilots.

Bill

The US Navy teaches it was Midway that killed the institutional knowledge of JNAF. With some justice. It was a horrible blow.

But it did not prevent Japan from fielding Genda's Flying Circus - nor JAAF from fielding an effective fighter force either. Both only had moments of glory because of FUEL shortages - but when they were flying captured US fliers said they were surprised and impressed. We never did devise the combination of recon planes and fighter planes which could - when operating - tear up even B-29s (which is saying a lot because of how difficult it was to deal with even one B-29). It isn't that Japan could not build effective fighters or train effective pilots - surely.

IF you want to read history - fine - do that. IF you want to play a simulation of history - you need to program it so the victories are earned - not automatic. We didn't win because we always were right in our assumptions or superior in our technology. We came to respect Japanese ideas like long range high altitude recon planes - and we have invested in them ever since.

[el cid again]

ORIGINAL: wdolson

ORIGINAL: el cid again
Since Japan has two different systems (in game and IRL) - it would be possible to use DIFFERENT approaches for JAAF and JNAF. The problem is that JNAF is the bigger service - so giving it fewer pilots (which IRL was not the case) - isn't historically accurate either. JNAF has both more pilots and better pilots - and more units to feed with pilots. And arguing that pilot quality declined because it was written in stone is to miss the big picture: Japan knew how to train perfectly well - it got rid of its excessively high standards in favor of sound ones - and it could not do so ONLY because it lacked aviation spirit. WE have a game that permits the Allies to inflict such a situation if they can - and if they cannot - it is actually historically wrong to pretend they did so.

Late war, the lack of avgas did impact Japanese pilot training, but the quality of their training deteriorated before they began to run out of fuel. Japan was not prepared for a long war. They expected the war to be over in months.


REPLY: To be fair - not months - but a year or two. And the quality of their training did NOT deteriorate at all - but actually improved. Don't listen to assumptions or propaganda. Japan constantly figured out they could do this or that better. Midwar Japan adopted the loose duce - which was somewhat better than the loose vic they started with - which itself was better than OUR vic which we started with. You are confusing pilots with 15 flight hours and pilots with hundreds of flight hours. The products of the program who actually got to fly were probably ALWAYS better than ours - on a statistical average basis.

Initially they gave no thought to expanding their training program to replace losses. When the losses began to mount, they needed to do something fast and cut a lot of corners to get pilots into combat units as fast as possible. They couldn't scale up their prewar training program because it was designed to wash out as many candidates as possible so they ended up with only the best and it lasted years. That system was completely unworkable during a full scale war. The British and US systems could be scaled with only minor changes compared to what the Japanese faced.

REPLY: This starts out correctly. Not that there were not voices calling for a scale up - there were. And the call was eventually adopted - but it was too late in time to cope. You may argue this should be structural - but I argue we could not know that during the war. Our pre war assumptions about pilot quality were dead wrong. Much of what we believed during and since the war is somewhat wrong. Even your views would change if you read extensively in Japanese materials - because much of what is there is wholly absent in English materials.


The Code of Bushido was also terrible at conserving human capital. They realized way too late that the code led to the unnecessary loss of a lot of skilled people who they desperately needed.

Bill

There is some truth to this last as well. Some people understood it was a problem - see Adm Yamamoto. And Bushido was officially long dead. But its spirit undeniably survived in many. Japanese are even worse than Americans about nationalism and patriotism and macho nonsense - to this day. Both tend to give into such things more often than not.

[el cid again]

ORIGINAL: Nikademus


Japanese pilot quality declined because her system was not designed until later in the war to churn out large #'s of qualified pilots and in the latter half of the war, because stocks of avgas began to run out forcing a truncation of flight hours for the new trainees....not because it was written in stone.

Just so. So lets not force poor quality on them in any mod. Because we should not write it in stone. Let the Allies earn their victory - if they can - and let the Japanese have a small - outside chance - if they can.

FYI there is a Japanese language RHS site. Not a WITP site - an RHS WITP site. It says RHS is more historically accurate.

[Nikademus]

ORIGINAL: el cid again

Just so. So lets not force poor quality on them in any mod. Because we should not write it in stone. Let the Allies earn their victory - if they can - and let the Japanese have a small - outside chance - if they can.

It doesn't. It gives Japan a limited pool of qualified, but not elite pilots with a median value of 65 that the Japan player can use to conduct a limited attritional war. How fast it runs out depends in large part on how the player uses it's airforces.

[Elladan]

And as I have seen many times the discussion inevitably slips into history talk. That leads me to a certain thought, Sid, have you ever played a WitP game against a human opponent? I have strong suspicion you haven't as that would explain your way of thinking a lot. Am I right?

[el cid again]

Actually - I have played a number of WITP games vs humans - and I still have the save games on file. Mifune agreed to work on the Japanese tag team because he said playing me had given him an idea of my style - and he felt comfortable with it.

In addition, I played Uncommon Valor for a long time before WITP existed - or became tolerable (map wise) in my view.
The engine is the same, as you may know.

In addition, I have played many forms of WITP of the mechanical sort - including the one the name comes from - the SPI monster game.

In addition, I have designed and played many forms of WITP in the professional world - but not the published world.
One classmate of mine talked the University of Washington into giving him 30 credits for playing one of these games with me!

I regard all these things as context.

My background in gaming was to come from it as a military professional. I used games first of all to understand military concepts. Later I used them to simulate things - to help develop a mind set of practice against opponents - where there was no risk of casualties. I don't really play games for fun - although I enjoy playing them. I play games seriously - and I fight real battles as if they were games. I have learned that simulation and training are fantastic tools. In first aid we learned that people trained in ANY procedure do well in ALL situations - because they have learned to think in terms of coping and using what they have to cope with. I call dealing with ANY situation "first aid" in this context. I once deliberately walked into a bank - armed with a real first aid kit - deliberately - after shots were fired - in the belief that probably some opportunity would arise and I could take over - in time to save a life (even from a 12 gage wound). It did and I did. I once had to fight a tactical land battle outnumbered more than 12 to 1 - and that only because I got along with the natives well enough to double my force size: my XO said (in absentia) "no officer on this ship would consider engaging (so large) a force - but it will never occur to (my last name) not to". I have a clue how games can be played.

At the heart of my method is to force players into a CONTEST where there is UNCERTAINTY - and where outcomes are earned rather than programmed in by the data. I do not confuse the choices of real world historical actors with the choices of players in the game (or participants in a real contest). You can program for different reasons - in the commercial world the most common is "playability." Another is to force a historical outcome. I consider these things desireable but secondary priority. I prefer to focus on setting up a "natural" situation in which there is a broad range of possibilities.

Giving Japan far fewer pilots replacements than it really generated (and remember I take out those not flying planes or not flying planes in our units) is not a way to get to accuracy in any case. Later in the war it generated even more than it did at the start - and I do nothing about that. I only give it the small number it had then. Lets not exaggerate this - or pretend giving it a tiny fraction of the real number is "accurate" simulation.

[Elladan]

Ok, it just sounds sometimes like you hadn't. As for replacement pilots, do you really think Allied exp 40 - Japan exp 70 is adequate to real situation late in the war? Let's not talk about number of those pilots, with current settings both sides will have enough to not bother. And please keep to the game, real war was run on slightly different "game engine" [;)]

[Nikademus]

ORIGINAL: el cid again

Giving Japan far fewer pilots replacements than it really generated (and remember I take out those not flying planes or not flying planes in our units) is not a way to get to accuracy in any case. Later in the war it generated even more than it did at the start - and I do nothing about that. I only give it the small number it had then. Lets not exaggerate this - or pretend giving it a tiny fraction of the real number is "accurate" simulation.

Before you cast judgement on other modder's method's, i'd suggest you take a look at PzB's AAR. It might give you a clue on a flaw/exploit in your pilot replacement setup.

[el cid again]

ORIGINAL: Elladan

Ok, it just sounds sometimes like you hadn't. As for replacement pilots, do you really think Allied exp 40 - Japan exp 70 is adequate to real situation late in the war? Let's not talk about number of those pilots, with current settings both sides will have enough to not bother. And please keep to the game, real war was run on slightly different "game engine" [;)]

Oh yes. On the following basis:

a) There is ample evidence we regarded pilot trainees as unfit for combat. We could and did arrange for them to get experience before being sent to combat. This is well simulated in the game too - where you get units with low starting experience but can train them up in the game. It would not do to give those units replacements with high experience.

b) Both JAAF and JNAF "cheated" late in the war and created new units by robbing numbers of experienced pilots from the line. This is something more popular in Axis nations than in the US - and US Army doctrine says it is actually wrong to do so. Even so - it meant that these units were very effective (when they could be fed avgas) - and that they were (and in more than one service with more than one type of plane ) puts the lie to "Japanese planes were inferior" or "Japanese tactics late in the war were inferior." But it would not do to feed such units low experience replacements - or the model would not simulate their effectiveness (assuming the Japanese are able to generate supply points to fly them).

[el cid again]

ORIGINAL: Nikademus

ORIGINAL: el cid again

Giving Japan far fewer pilots replacements than it really generated (and remember I take out those not flying planes or not flying planes in our units) is not a way to get to accuracy in any case. Later in the war it generated even more than it did at the start - and I do nothing about that. I only give it the small number it had then. Lets not exaggerate this - or pretend giving it a tiny fraction of the real number is "accurate" simulation.

Before you cast judgement on other modder's method's, i'd suggest you take a look at PzB's AAR. It might give you a clue on a flaw/exploit in your pilot replacement setup.

I believe I was clearly commenting on a comment - your comment in fact - of what you did. I am not commenting on how a mod plays. I am commenting on entering data not based on actual values from actual institutions (modified as appropriate for things not in the mod - like trainers and various other planes - instructors - staff - etc). I also said above I was not willing to comment on mods not played by me directly.

[Nikademus]

ORIGINAL: el cid again

I am commenting on entering data not based on actual values from actual institutions (modified as appropriate for things not in the mod - like trainers and various other planes - instructors - staff - etc).

So you say. seems to be more fluff along the lines of;

There is merit in this approach. But whatever can be said for it - historically accurate it isn't.

Like I said, before you start passing comments about other people's approaches, i'd suggest reading PzB's AAR. You might realize the ahistorical flaw you've got going in your own briar patch.